40 percent of state lottery scholarship recipients tank

LITTLE ROCK (AP) - About 40 percent of first time traditional freshmen who received scholarships funded by the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery last year were not academically eligible to maintain those scholarships or chose not to return to college this fall.

A report released Friday by the state Department of Higher Education showed that 6,728 - or 59.5 percent of those students - continued to receive their scholarships in the 2011-12 academic year.

Many of the students who lost their scholarships didn't meet credit-hour or grade point average requirements, said Shane Broadway, interim director of the Higher Education Department, which administers the scholarships. Others opted to drop out of college or transferred out-of state.

"You always want all of the students to return," Broadway said. "You want every student who had the scholarship to retain their eligibility for the next year, but you know that is not always going to occur."

The state awarded 31,109 Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarships to traditional and nontraditional students in the 2011-12 academic year, according to preliminary figures released by the department Friday. That's 22 fewer scholarships than last year.

The department awarded 11,960 scholarships to first time traditional students, a 5.68 percent increase over 2010-11 levels. A traditional student is defined as one who attends college immediately after graduating from high school.

Those numbers will be revised as data are finalized through the end of the fall semester, but they will remain roughly the same, said Harold Criswell, interim deputy director at the department.

The data will give lawmakers and education officials the first peek into how many recipients are retained for multiple years and help them determine the size and number of scholarships in future years.

This is the second year of an expanded Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship program funded by the state lottery, which was approved by voters in 2008. Policymakers used the lottery funds to expand the size and number of the scholarship awards, lowering eligibility requirements to make them available to more students.

Students awarded scholarships for the first time this year will receive $4,500 a year to attend four-year universities and $2,250 a year to attend two-year colleges.

Last year's recipients received $5,000 (four-year schools) and $2,500 (two-year schools) and will continue to receive those amounts until they graduate or lose eligibility.

The Higher Education Department will work with lawmakers to analyze the data to determine why students lost eligibility, Broadway said. They'll look at factors such as what high school classes the students took and their high school grades.

"Now that we've got one year behind us, we're going to be able to dig deeper," Broadway said.

In July, the department announced that 7,906 of last year's recipients were on probation because they did not meet academic requirements.

Students had to maintain at least a 2.5 cumulative grade point average and complete 27 to 30 credit hours to maintain the scholarships.

Students on probation could have opted to take summer courses to add credit hours or raise their grades, Broadway said.

After examining data, it will be up to lawmakers to determine if eligibility requirements should be changed, he said.

"It's hard to say after one year this is a definite, but there may be something when you look at the data that needs to be addressed," Broadway said.

The department awarded 4,525 scholarships to nontraditional students, defined as students who return to college after an extended absence or those are attending for the first time with some delay after completing high school.

Last year, the department awarded 8,689 of those scholarships.

The number dropped to nearly half the first-year level because many of those students graduated and the state provided no new funding for nontraditional scholarships, Broadway said. Act 1180 of 2011 limits funding to $12 million for the nontraditional student category.

In addition, 3,125 students awarded Academic Challenge Scholarships before the addition of lottery funds to the program also received funding this year, down from 4,963 last year, the report showed.

Of 6,162 "current achievers" - or those who were already enrolled in college before the scholarship was expanded and received it for the first time under the new rules - 4,771 continued to receive the scholarship.

Lawmakers will review the data and revenue projections for the lottery before determining how scholarships will be allotted in the future, said Julie Baldridge, interim director of the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery.

Baldridge said she's "cautiously optimistic" that the lottery will bring in as much scholarship revenue for the current 2012 fiscal year as it did for the 2011 fiscal year, which ended June 30. She hesitated to make a precise revenue projection.

The lottery provided about $94.2 million in scholarship revenue for the current academic year, less than an earlier projection of $105 million, Baldridge said.

Scholarship revenue ran about $7 million per month in July, August and September of this year, she said, keeping it largely on track with last year's levels.

"I think November and December are going to tell us the story about what we can expect," Baldridge said.

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40 percent of state lottery scholarship recipients tank

LITTLE ROCK (AP) - About 40 percent of first time traditional freshmen who received scholarships funded by the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery last year were not academically eligible to maintain those